[jwestbury]

I went to a well-regarded state school, thus graduated with less debt, but I'm in the same boat -- graduated with an English degree in 2008, having decided after a year of computer science classes that it wasn't for me. I started university a self-important ass, and the English program forced me outside my comfort zone repeatedly, leaving me a very different, much more open-minded person than I started as.

I somehow found my way back into tech, and have spent a decade across several well-regarded tech giants and now a hedge fund. Throughout that journey, I've received consistent praise for my soft skills, which have generally surpassed those of my peers, and have allowed me to excel beyond where I would ever have gotten on raw technical talent. Those soft skills would likely never have developed without majoring in the humanities.

It's terribly sad to see the slow death of the humanities. Perhaps if more people read some Jonathan Swift, we'd be in a different world and the humanities would still thrive.